QuickBooks 2013 Customers Menu Odds and Ends

The Customers menu in QuickBooks 2013 supplies several commands that are noteworthy — perhaps even useful — and deserve discussion. Here is a brief description of the lesser used commands that may be available on your Customers menu:

Customer Center: Displays the Customer Center window, which includes information about your customer list, including the amounts that your customers owe.

Create Estimates: Displays a window you can use to create an estimate for a customer to show them, for example, what a product or service will cost if you sell it to them.

Create Sales Orders: Displays a window you can use to create a sales order. Essentially, a sales order is an invoice for something you haven’t yet really sold or for services you haven’t yet provided. You prepare a sales order to record an order from a customer or client and document the order details.

Sales Order Fulfillment Worksheet: Displays the Sales Order Fulfillment worksheet window, which lists all your unfulfilled sales orders. You can print batches of sales orders using this worksheet, too. (Note: If you’ve created sales orders for a particular customer or client, QuickBooks asks whether you want to turn a sales order into an invoice whenever you start working on an invoice for that customer.)

Create Batch Invoices: Displays the Batch Invoice dialog box, which lets you identify a group of customers you want to bill for some specified item. After you've grouped, or batched the customers in this manner, you can tell QuickBooks to create a bunch (a batch) of invoices.

For example, if you charged customers a monthly retainer fee, you could batch the customers on retainer and then create an invoice for each of them that billed for the monthly retainer fee item.

Enter Statement Charges: Displays the Accounts Receivable Register. You shouldn’t need to use this command. You can, however, use this command to add amounts to the accounts receivable for a particular customer. The amounts then appear on the customer’s next statement.

Create Statements: Displays a window that you can use to create a set of monthly statements for customers. Such statements show the amounts that a customer owes, invoices created for the month, credit memos issued for the month, and payments made during the month.

Lead Center: Displays the Lead Center window, which lets you store and monitor customer leads. The window lets you name names, collect notes, and keep a to-do list of lead-generation activities.

Add Electronic Check: Displays a web page that explains and tries to talk you into buying Intuit’s electronic check service. With an electronic check, or e-check, you take payment information from a customer over the phone and then use that information to electronically withdraw money from the customer’s bank account.

Link Payment Services to Company File: Makes the connection between your QuickBooks data file and the Intuit servers — something that’s necessary if you sign up for credit card or electronic check processing.

Add Marketing and Customer Tools: Displays a submenu of commands you can use to get information about add-on products and services that Intuit and other companies sell to improve marketing, manage field service activities, or use EDI (electronic data interchange) to share business data with other companies.

Learn about Point of Sale: Displays a web page that explains and tries to talk you into buying Intuit’s point-of-sale software.

Item List: Displays the Item list, which shows the items that may be included on the invoice or credit memo.

Change Item Prices: Lets you change the prices of a bunch of different items at one time — for example, increasing every price by 5 percent.